It is a January, nine degrees Fahrenheit not-yet-light morning on the Bog, and Monday.  When I was a child I believed that, except for a few birds, nothing much could live in winter.  Though I knew about hibernating animals, they sort of reinforced the point that winter cold and dark somehow stifle or inhibit life, put it "on hold," which not coincidentally is what it did to my life.  My parents couldn't afford to put us in warm boots, coats and mittens so we stayed inside, biding our time until warmer temperatures teased us back outside again.

In this place, though, near tamarack and marsh there is always life and it is a revelation that never grows old although I worry that it might someday, which is probably why I risked everything in an experiment of sorts.  Life, it can seem, is ever in need of protection and this seeming is a kind of suffering for some of us and also a source of great tenderness and joy.  Lily the miniature schnauzer lies at my feet, snoring softly, seemingly muttering to herself as schnauzers do, and every deep breath is precious, at least in part because someday there will be a final shuddering breath and an end that I would prevent, if I only could.

So the risky experiment.  A pet goldfish named Flo outgrew her bowl and we had to decide what to do with her and the best thing seemed to be to afford her some kind of freedom, if it could be had. So I dug a hole in our tiny  courtyard not far from the front door and in view of the front windows. It had to be at least two and half feet deep with water and would, so I read, allow Flo to live year around right there under the window, just off the front door.  Goldfish and others of the carp family can live as long as fifty years under the right conditions, and we approximated those conditions as best we knew how.  We found a few other fish to add to the pond to keep her company and gradually autumn turned to winter and winter on the Bog gets very cold. The pond froze over but for the small hole kept thawed by a small floating device to allow toxic gases to escape and good oxygen to get into the water.  The waterfall all but froze but for what seemed like a tiny trickle and the ice was thick. We could not see Flo and her companions at all.  Probably, I thought, they were dead and sunk to the bottom of the pond--because nothing could live out there except in some kind of special conditions which we hadn't known how to create. A few birds, maybe. Everything else--frozen and lifeless.  I dreaded the thaw when I would have to face my reckless perfidy in putting Flo out into the cold.  Anticipatory guilt and regret tugged at me as the days grew warmer.

One morning there melted a large hole in the ice and hanging all but motionless they were all there, facing into the very small current created by an electric pump about which they neither knew or cared. They were quite literally hanging out, glinting gold and bright in the clear, refracted sunlight, their gill covers pushing water over and through almost imperceptibly, calmly.

Every winter it is the same. Every break in the weather or the ice offering a peek into the hidden water, is a jolting surprise, a revelation that stops me in my otherwise meandering tracks. Against common sense (well, common to me anyway) and what seems like all odds, they are just hanging around through the winter biding their time, too, holding out for warmer--better? merely different? times.  More than the endless wheel of change that are the seasons as time seems to pass (Einstein believed time a pernicious delusion,) the unchanging fish communicate quietly and persuasively of grace, of things present and without end or beginning and my childish assumptions about "how things are" get put on hold.  I sort of learn how to just hang around too, and listen deeply to Lily snore and mutter and minding my own breath, feel a frisson of delight that we are all alive.